388 SPIDERS AND WILD BEASTS. 



the human habitation and its neighbourhood, in those which 



" Spread their nets, whether they be 

 In poet's tower, cellar, barn, or tree," 



and which, comprising the spinners of house and garden, are 

 of a class called Sedentaries, in distinction to the " Vagrants" 

 and " Hunters" which, using no net, either lie in ambuscade, 

 or roam about, seeking what they may devour. 



Now, as the " Sedentaries " are best representatives of preying 

 men, so these latter, the " Vagrants " and the " Hunters/' are 

 the nearer prototypes of preying beasts. And first, the " Va- 

 grants," cunning also in their cruelty, bear, perhaps, greatest 

 resemblance to the feline races, springing, like the tiger from 

 his lair, upon their unsuspecting prey. Of these, one 1 forms 

 or finds its ambush in a rolled-up leaf; another 2 lurks 

 behind a stone or the gaping bark of an old tree ; a third 3 (as 

 a tiger in his jungle) sits embowered in the thick panicle of a 

 reed ; while a fourth, ensconced, as at bottom of a pit, in the 

 calyx of a dead flower, sits prepared to pounce upon the first 

 unwary fly happening to visit it in search of honey. 



If the more wary roamers of the forest and the desert have 

 thus their insect images amongst spider " Vagrants" the more 

 daring have resemblances as apt in the bolder "Hunters" such 

 as spring openly on their prey, and, after destroying, carry it 

 for devourment to their dens. On a flowering shrub sits an 

 enormous hairy-leg of this description, on the look-out, we may 

 be sure, for game : perhaps a swollen blue-bottle, a fat drone 

 bee, or an overgrown crane-fly ? No ; he aims, or we may 

 almost say he flies, at a higher quarry at a living prey, lustrous 

 as a gem, swift as the lightning; as it darts from flower to 

 flower, too rapid on the wing for human sight to follow, yet 

 not so rapid as to elude the eight-eyed vision of the monster 

 which has marked it for destruction not so rapid as to out- 

 strip his eight-legged spring, or to escape the eight terrible 



1 Clubiona holosericeum. C. atrox. 3 Aranea arundinacea. 



